As Hyperloop One shuts down, we need to remember that the Hyperloop was never meant to be built.
Elon Musk’s goal was never to transform transportation for the masses, but to stop or delay high-speed rail from reaching North America. Sadly, he succeeded — and we all lost as a result. While the rest of the world moved forward, the US remains stuck in the past.
The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled.
He never planned to improve transportation; he just wants to keep people trapped in cars.
European governments have “systematically” shrunk their railways and starved them of funding while pouring money into expanding their road network, a report has found.
The length of motorways in Europe grew 60% between 1995 and 2020 while railways shrank 6.5%, according to research from German thinktanks Wuppertal Institute and T3 Transportation. For every €1 governments spent building railways, they spent €1.6 building roads.
In ‘news that should surprise nobody but it’s nice to have it quantified’: high speed rail is less carbon intensive than short-haul flights, even when you take into account the full life cycle (including construction).
In other words, we should be banning short-haul flights and investing in trains.
Scotland has launched a trial to encourage greater use of the rail network and get people out of the cars.
For 6 months there will be no peak-rate fares, only the cheaper off-peak fares.
'The ambitious project, which is a first of its kind in the UK rail industry, will support the Scottish Government’s ambition to achieve net zero, providing more people with the opportunity to use trains as their primary form of transport'
🚂 "The #train now boarding at Platform 3 is the 02:30 Paranal Express service to Proxima Centauri." 😉
I took this #photo at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile back when I worked there. This wagon was donated by the FCAB (Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia). It's being restored by ESO engineer Roberto Castillo, and it will serve as a museum showcasing various astronomical instruments.
Whenever I write about the Hyperloop, I always get some people who refuse to believe that Elon Musk opposed high-speed rail and used Hyperloop to try to stop it.
In a Patreon bonus episode of #TechWontSaveUs, @awalkerinla has even more proof: She saw Musk tell transport planners that cities should stop rail projects.
Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride is a documentary film by local timelapse photographer Vincent Woo. Embark on a journey with a camera secretly attached to a BART train and ride through the arteries of the Bay Area. A hidden world is revealed through intersecting passageways, flashes of graffiti, and sections of track only witnessed by BART operators:
Over and over we’ve been told self-driving cars would solve our transport problems only for them not to deliver.
In 2023, Waymo and Cruise promised us their services had finally cracked the code — but a new scandal in San Francisco shows they deceived us once again. We need to stop falling for their fantasies and take real action to fix our transport system.
For those unfamiliar with it, Lemmy is basically a federated version of Reddit, distributed across multiple servers like Mastodon. (For anyone who wants to delve further, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and aussie.zone are three popular Lemmy instances.)
From Mastodon, you can follow any Lemmy group by following its handle, exactly the same way that you would follow a Mastodon account. Any new posts to that group will then begin appearing in your Mastodon feed.
Even better, if you start a thread on Mastodon, you can also post it to a relevant Lemmy group just by including its handle in your post. (Please note this only seems to work with the first post of a thread.)
A top European auto safety body is releasing new rules that will require physical buttons and knobs for key vehicle features to receive a full five-star safety rating. I’d like to see the same in North America.
Effroyables images de l'effondrement du pont routier "Francis Scott Key, à Baltimore, dans le Mayrland aux États-Unis. C'est un navire qui est entré en collision avec l'un des piliers de l'ouvrage, causant sa destruction immédiate, selon les médias US.
“driving within Paris city limits has fallen by about 45% since the early 1990s, while public transport use has risen by 30% and cycle use by about 1,000%.”
Macron se félicite que le Pass Rail "devienne réalité": "Devant Hugo (Travers), j'avais dit banco", se gargarise le président sur Twitter X. En réalité, le chef de l'Etat avait promis un dispositif "simple, ouvert à tous et durable". Le Pass Rail est interdit aux plus de 27 ans, valable seulement cet été et sur les seuls TER et intercités... Bien loin du modèle allemand sur lequel Macron promettait de prendre exemple.
Robotaxis run by Waymo and Cruise are blocking transit and emergency vehicles in San Francisco, so local activists are pushing back.
For Disconnect, I spoke to @SafeStreetRebel about using traffic cones to disable the driverless cars and their campaign to stop the state regulator from expanding robotaxi service. They’re doing the important work of fighting against tech for a better city!
One of the key elements of the green transition must be finding ways to not only shift to public transport, but to also find more efficient (less polluting) ways of using private transport when (for whatever reason) non-collective transport is required.
So, its really disappointing that the UK's experiments in car share clubs (just when they are becoming ever more vital) are undermined by a lack of available insurance cover;